There is no sense in rushing through life. What are you rushing to get to? Death? People forget that we are all moving towards the same inevitable end, the same destination. Nobody in the history of mankind has ever benefited from rushing in his everyday life (barring certain life or death scenarios of course).
Now, rushing through life is not the same as having a sense of urgency.
See, a sense of urgency is necessary for you to be able to get shit done. You need to have a certain “push factor” that will drive you to want to get things done. The reason you need that is because of a little thing called Parkinson’s Law, an adage which states that:
“Work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. “
In other words, you don’t really know how quickly you can get something done until you try to do it in less time than it’s physically possible. Only the physical limits count, everything else is up for grabs.
The stoics used to have a very useful tool to create this sense of urgency – it goes by the name of Memento Mori.
Remember that you have to die.
What greater sense of urgency is there than the cessation of life? What greater force to drive you forward in life than the knowledge that, like everything else, you too will one day turn to dust in the wind?
“Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky”.
If you need more than that to convince you, are you really living?